Tennessee’s Maury County Public Schools today announced a new partnership with Discovery Education focused on building problem-based learning (PBL) environments districtwide.
The district is providing educators across the school system access to digital content from Discovery Education Streaming Plus, a comprehensive digital service supplementing instruction across all K-12 curricular areas. In addition, more than 100 teachers and administrators from across the district will participate in the PBL Champion Leader Corps, an initiative of Discovery Education’s Professional Development Services. PBL Champion Leader Corps will officially launch on April 7 with a special community event.
This new partnership allows educators to build problem-based learning environments aligned to Maury County Public Schools’ Keys to College and Career Readiness. Created with input from stakeholders across Maury County, the Keys to College and Career Readiness outline specific learning targets for students at various grade levels, and are used to guide the school system in aligning district resources to community needs and expectations.
Streaming Plus’ digital resources are aligned to state standards and are searchable, and include videos, images, primary source documents, podcasts, oral interviews, audio books, articles and more. Teacher resources include lesson plans, instructional strategies and content collections organized around themes, as well as instructional videos, skill builders, writing prompts, multimedia activities and articles. Through its Board Builder feature, students can create virtual project boards using multimedia and text to synthesize their thinking and provide evidence of their understanding of a concept or problem.
Discovery Education’s Professional Development Services will serve as the foundation of the Maury County Public Schools’ PBL Champion Leader Corps, providing job-embedded instructional coaching, and administrative leadership support. Participating educators will learn how to develop high-quality lessons, transdisciplinary units, and the leadership skills to grow a culture of problem-based learning in their school system. Every school has selected four educators to serve as teacher-leaders who will progress through the program over four years. Discovery Education experts will work closely with these teacher leaders to establish ‘learning lab’ classrooms in their school. These classrooms will provide opportunities for colleagues to observe and collaborate on the instructional strategies demonstrated and modeled in the ‘learning lab,’ so they can apply similar teaching strategies in their own classrooms and share with their peers district-wide.
The Discovery Educator Network (DEN) will also support Maury County Public Schools’ educators in their efforts to transform students’ learning experiences with digital media. A global community of education professionals, the DEN connects members across school systems and around the world through social media, virtual conferences, and in-person events.
